The Dungeon Fairy: Three Lives: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 3) Jonathan Brooks (read me like a book .txt) 📖

The passageway led to a largeish room, though it was only large because it was so long; he estimated that it was around 200 feet in length, and there didn’t appear to be anything inside defending the tunnel.  On a second look, he saw small holes along the left and right walls, which he suspected had some sort of arrow or bolt trap, just waiting to strike out at them as they passed by.  Further investigation showed some peculiar bulges in the ceiling, spaced out evenly along the room.

“Uh, boss?  I’d turn your Detect Traps on if I were you,” Derf said, sounding a bit strangled for some reason.

Using his skill, the hallway was immediately flooded with light as traps were lit up all over the place.  He tried to differentiate them but couldn’t, as they all blended into each other until they were all one giant mass.  “Whoa!  It’s too much, I can’t see them all.”  Marvus deactivated the skill and everything went back to normal.

“I can see them, but it’s probably only because my Detect skill is so high, sort of like your Valuation Sense.  I think my Disarm Trap skill is high enough to deactivate most of them, but that’s not the problem.”

Marvus looked at Derf, not liking to hear about problems at this stage.  “What’s the problem?”

The trap-specializing Cohort member scratched the back of his head as he looked down the hallway.  “Well, like I said, I can probably Disarm these, but it will take hours.”

Hours?  We’ve already been here for 3 or 4 hours; any longer and we risk someone else finding out about this place and stealing my treasure.  If that’s what it takes, though, we’ve already come this far.  Besides, the last time he had gotten close to a Core, he had found a treasure trove of magnificent proportions.  He said the same thing to the crew – leaving out details of what exactly happened – who all just shrugged in response.  “I suppose we can wait a few more hours.  Do your thing.”

Derf just sighed and got to work, getting on his knees and inching forward, with his hand outstretched.  Marvus knew from experience that more difficult traps required a delicate touch as well as proximity, so it was dangerous to try disarming something that was powerful.  Higher Levels in the Disarm Traps skill would allow disarming both quicker and from farther away, but these traps were apparently right at or near the top of the difficulty scale.

Now there wasn’t anything else to do but wait.

Chapter 11

Tacca was wrong.

“Expect the unexpected, I guess,” her Dungeon Assistant said, unhelpfully.

That didn’t make her feel any better, but he was right; she should’ve expected the group of Thieves and Brigands to have a specialist in trap detection and disarmament.  Her previous thought that they would be too high of a Level to Disarm was a mistake, and it was one that she wouldn’t be making again.  She would replace each of them one at a time, using both her larger Dungeon Force pool and the 40% reduction of trap costs to make them even more powerful, upping the requirement to Disarm them by a significant amount.  It wouldn’t stop the extremely high-Level Raiders out there, but ones like those currently in her dungeon would have a difficult time Disarming even one of them. She couldn’t wait to enhance her security, after seeing the flaws in them.

Of course, she needed to get rid of these pesky pests first.

“I’m actually surprised they survived your Boss Room.  I thought you had gone a little overboard, but in that case I was mistaken.”

She answered Shale with a low chuckle.  No, you were right – I did go a bit far there with the amount of Wolves I created, but I really couldn’t hide my dislike of them all, especially that Marvus character.  It was more than a bit wrong of me, I will freely acknowledge, and I shouldn’t let my emotions affect me like that.  She felt bad that so many of the group had died, because she didn’t really have anything against them – only their leader.  They had taken the brunt of her anger, however, and while they seemed as greedy as Marvus, she could tell that the now-dead Raiders were only following orders.

“That’s…quite astute of you to recognize that,” Shale said slowly, watching the Raiders working to slowly Disarm the traps in her defensive room from behind them.  He had his Invisibility up, so they couldn’t see him – just like he had the entire time the Raiders had been inside of Tacca’s dungeon – but he had to be careful not to get too close or they might sense him.  She wouldn’t put it past these people to have something that would allow them to do that, especially since she had underestimated them already.  “But I think you’re being too hard on yourself,” he continued.  “Based on their strength and numbers, a well-balanced group of 15 Raiders – let alone the 20 that they arrived with – would’ve been able to defeat everything you threw at them without casualties.  It was only their lack of diversity that caused them to lose so many.”

Tacca had to admit that was true.  The Boss Room was meant to be just barely beatable by a balanced group of 5 Raiders around Level 15, but even that was pushing it.  Higher Levels would have a much easier time, and a group of Level 20s should have no trouble at all.  Of course, everything was a little skewed by how many additional creatures she had added, including the 80 Level 3 Forest Wolves she had added to the Boss Room, after some of her Control Limit was freed up as the dungeon was cleared.